Planner's Verse needs a landing page. Also? This one went way over 250.

Mid-summer, probably year 317 Post-Conflict

The Lore-speaker tells me, in no uncertain terms, that for the tribes to not raid, they would have to stop being the tribes.

He tells me many things, this historian and dispute-mediator of the Kavah, father of my young mistress and master, father, it seems, of the second child now growing in me. As the weeks have travelled into months, as my son has grown into a large and loud baby and my belly has swollen again, it has more and more seemed to be that he is my master, and not his son and daughter.

Today’s events have confirmed that, and more. Today, journal, we watched the marriage of the chieftain to those who were my master and mistress.

The ceremony was intriguing, and, as an anthropologist, I paid very close attention to the ritual. I wish I had access to the books of the Library; I have a feeling I’ve read portions of this before, in wide and varied places.

The whole tribe was there to witness, babies, slaves, old grandpas, nursing mothers, everyone, gathered into a clearing which they only ever use for important rituals. All of them there, and my former master and mistress dressed in their stolen and crafted finest.

The goblet was stolen, but it had been re-worked into something else, the lip cut and shaped to have three openings. Into these, the chieftain and his young bride and groom inserted flat metal disks, carved and inlaid with patterns which, I was told, indicate the story of each of them.

The drink is fermented mare’s milk, heavily laden with herbs and hoarded spices. I could smell it several meters away – rich and pungent. The words are not in their normal day-to-day vocabulary, but I have noted them phonetically in the appendix. The meaning of it, I was told, was a joining of two houses by three people. A three-legged stool, the Lore-speaker explained, is more stable than one or two legs.

And then he said something which nearly stopped my breath. “I have no brother, no sister,” he murmured. His former partners, the mother of the bride and groom today and her brother, I already knew had died of a plague some years past.

Then he looked to the Tower, high up on the horizon. I understood the question he wasn’t asking, and risked answering it anyway.